The Reader by Bernhard Schlink Page A

and chest. Her skin was smooth and soft to the touch, the body beneath it strong and reliable. When my hand lay on her calf, I felt the constant twitching play of muscles. It reminded me of the way a horse twitches its hide to repel flies. “A horse.”
    “A horse?” She disentangled herself, sat up and stared at me, stared in shock.
    “You don’t like it? It came to me because you feel so good, smooth and soft and all firm and strong underneath. And because your calf twitches.” I explained my association.
    She looked at the ripple of the muscles in her calf. “Horse.” She shook her head. “I don’t know . . .”
    That wasn’t how she usually was. Usually she was absolutely single-minded, whether in agreement or disagreement. Faced with her look of shock, I had been ready to take it all back if necessary, blame myself, and apologize. But now I tried to reconcile her to the horse. “I could call you Cheval or Pony or Little Equus. When I think of horses, I don’t think horse’s teeth or horse face or whatever it is that worries you, I think of something good, warm, soft, strong. You’re not a bunny or a kitten, and whatever there is in a tiger—that evil something—that’s not you either.”
    She lay down on her back, arms behind her head. Now it was me who sat up to look at her. She was staring into space. After a while she turned her face to me. Her expression was curiously naked. “Yes, I like it when you call me Horse or those other horse names—can you explain them to me?”
    Once we went to the theater in the next town to see Schiller’s
Intrigues and Love.
It was the first time Hanna had been to the theater, and she loved all of it, from the performance to the champagne at intermission. I put my arm around her waist, and didn’t care what people might think of us as a couple, and I was proud that I didn’t care. At the same time, I knew that in the theater in our hometown I would care. Did she know that too?
    She knew that my life that summer no longer revolved around her, and school, and my studies. More and more, when I came to her in the late afternoon, I came from the swimming pool. That was where our class got together, did our homework, played soccer and volleyball and skat, and flirted. That was where our class socialized, and it meant a lot to me to be part of it and to belong. The fact that I came later than the others or left earlier, depending on Hanna’s schedule, didn’t hurt my reputation, but made me interesting. I knew that. I also knew that I wasn’t missing anything, and yet I often had the feeling that absolutely everything could be happening while I wasn’t there. There was a long stretch when I did not dare ask myself whether I would rather be at the swimming pool or with Hanna. But on my birthday in July, there was a party for me at the pool, and it was hard to tear myself away from it when they didn’t want me to go, and then an exhausted Hanna received me in a bad mood. She didn’t know it was my birthday. When I had asked her about hers, and she had told me it was the twenty-first of October, she hadn’t asked me when mine was. She was also no more bad-tempered than she always was when she was exhausted. But I was annoyed by her bad temper, and I wanted to be somewhere else, at the pool, away with my classmates, swept up in the exuberance of our talk, our banter, our games, and our flirtations. Then when I proceeded to get bad-tempered myself and we started a fight and Hanna treated me like a nonentity, the fear of losing her returned and I humbled myself and begged her pardon until she took me back. But I was filled with resentment.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
    T HEN I began to betray her.
    Not that I gave away any secrets or exposed Hanna. I didn’t reveal anything that I should have kept to myself. I kept something to myself that I should have revealed. I didn’t acknowledge her. I know that disavowal is an unusual form of betrayal. From the outside it is impossible to